


On Living and Growing

by Ghelik



Series: The 100 Fics [24]
Category: The 100
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Future Fic, God Complex, Season/Series 04, unbetad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-11 20:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10473471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghelik/pseuds/Ghelik
Summary: Series of one shots about the Delinquents.Now featuring:1- On Love (Octavia)2- On Sacrifice (Murphy)





	1. On Love

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really like Octavia all that much, but this one sort of popped in my head. I had the beginning laying around for so long I thought I might as well post it.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Octavia fell from a boulder into the river when she realized she was in love

Love

 

When she was little, Bellamy was always telling her stories about star-crossed lovers in old myths. Her mum told the stories of Zeus turning himself into a bull and a swan to seduce unsuspecting young women, but Bellamy was the one who told her about Persephone and Hades, Cupid and Psique and even Romeo and Julia - she doesn’t like that last one. She likes the stories about Persephone and Hades and all the random adventures Octavia is half convinced Bellamy made up just for her.

 

When she was twelve she fantasized with being found out by her soulmate.

 

When she was fourteen she tired of waiting around and started being bitterly conscious that the only people she would ever see were her mum and her brother. That’s when she started resenting them and all the time they spend running around the Ark while she had to stay put.

 

In the skybox she was the freak girl that lived beneath the floor and she hated them all for knowing how to interact with each other and having a thousand stories to share.

 

She missed her mum and her brother and hated that she missed her room.

 

Bellamy came to visit as much as he could – not nearly enough. He never complained and had always stories for her. Always listened patiently to her complaining.

 

He brought her all the books he had including his favorite: a weathered copy of ‘The Illiad’ that belonged to their mum’s dad – Octavia is half sure he had to bribe the guards to let her keep them.

 

If it was supposed to be an apology, it sucked.

 

Still she can’t help but remember the books, hidden beneath the thin mattress of her cell and feel a twist knowing she lost them forever when she was hurled to the ground with the rest of the delinquents.

 

She discovers a lot of things running through the forest.

 

She discovers that she can keep pushing even when her legs protest and all her muscles burn. She won’t back down from a fight only because the other idiot is twice her size. She won’t wait around anymore.

 

Bellamy’s busy playing king and keeping everyone alive and she wants to be her own queen.

 

When she meets Lincoln she’s terrified that she’s woken up in another box - there wouldn’t be anything worse than that. She was free and loosing that feels like dying. Lincoln never harms her, though and it feels wrong when her people – her brother – tortures him.

 

The world is big, ginormous and nobody should be restrained into a tiny room. That’s the main reason why she frees Lincoln.

 

Octavia isn’t sure why she goes looking for him.

 

Maybe she didn’t and she just happened to cross paths with him. She’s happy to see him: tall and stoic and powerful. He looks at her in a way that nobody has ever looked at her before and he gives her a knife. It’s a nice knife: the handle made of bone and covered in soft leather to prevent her grip from slipping, the blade, long and wickedly sharp. It is ten times better than any knife the delinquents could clobber together out of repurposed pieces of the dropship, and it is all hers.

When Lincoln turns to go, she asks him to stay, to keep her company; talk to her.

She hasn’t had all that much contact with the delinquents. Yes, Monty and Jasper are nice and they try to include her, but it is like it was in the skybox: they have fifteen years of shared stories and jokes. She has stories in books and a creeping fear of waking up and discovering it was all a dream.

 

Octavia knows she shouldn’t be sneaking out of camp to see Lincoln, but he listens to her. He teaches her how to move without making a sound and how to hunt. He doesn’t coddle her like Bellamy does, nor treats her like a freak as some of the delinquents do. Octavia knows that her brother is the only reason why nobody is openly hostile towards her. They’re scared of Bellamy. They respect Bellamy. She wants to show them all that they should respect her, too.

 

Lincoln does.

 

The first time she kisses him it sends a tingling all over her skin. He’s firm and strong and warm and she wants to burry herself in his arms and never come out. Lincoln laughs and kisses her back, all soft and kind. He’s always soft and kind when he isn’t hunting or teaching her. He’s a ruthless teacher. Octavia likes it.

 

Octavia is sitting by the river when she realizes she’s in love. She’s on watch while the rest of the team try to fish something out of the river. Which means that Harper and Monroe are actually working while Thomas and Louise fuck behind some bushes. She can hear them, but doesn’t care. As long as they’re moaning and trying to keep it quiet they’re alive and she’s doing her job. It’s a boring job because she knows there are no grounders nearby. They don’t attack near the river. River places are sacred for the grounders and they will only kill in order to appease the mountain men.

 

Her fishing team is no way near Mount Weather, so there is absolutely no risk to this expedition. Octavia is zoning in and out, thinking about random stuff that pops up in her brain, mostly Lincoln’s hands – because that man can do marvelous things with those hands – and she suddenly realizes that she knows why she keeps going back.

She knows that he’s as important to her as her brother and nobody ever was that important, not even her mum. The realization hits her like a ton of bricks and she falls off the boulder she was sitting on and into the water with an undignified squack.

 

Monroe is automatically on alert, eyes darting all around, while Harper bites her own tongue and instead of rushing out of the water just vanishes beneath it – apparently Harper likes diving.

 

Octavia emerges, spluttering and splashing. “What happened?” barks Monroe, knife in hand, all business.

 

“Nothing. I slipped.”

 

Monroe kicks Harper for her to resurface. “What is it?” the blonde girl asks.

 

“Octavia slipped. We’re fine.”

 

“Cool.” She brings out a handful of dirt and huge shells. “I found mollusks.”

 

When the war comes she wants to throttle her brother, beat him with one of his loved guns over the head, because here he is, once again, ruining her life with his recklessness.

 

Lincoln wants her to leave with him, to go to the sea and meet with his friend Luna. It sounds so good. It really does. But…

 

But when she’s preparing to leave she sees her brother, slumped over in a cot, dried blood in the corner of his mouth and eyes sunken with tiredness and her heart shrinks a little.

 

If she leaves now she knows she will never see him again. And it’s not as if these people mean all that much to her, but she kind of likes Monroe and Harper, insanely loyal Miller and goofy Jasper. Hell, even Clarke! She doesn’t want them to die.

 

And she really doesn’t want Bellamy to die.

 

As she looks down at him, she knows that, it doesn’t matter that he got her mum floated. It doesn’t matter that she was put in the skybox. She cannot conceive a world in which her brother is dead.

 

The fight is short-lived though. As is her victory against Indra. When the reapers take Lincoln away from her something inside her fractures. She doesn’t believe he’s dead. Can’t bring herself to think it.

 

And then he does die. Bellamy kills him. Pike shoots him, but it’s because Bellamy was too stupid, was too selfish, was too busy hating grounders to see that Pike is a ruthless murderer that deserves to die.

 

Octavia thinks about killing him. Every time she sees his freckled face, hears his deep voice – a voice that once meant the world to her and now has her wanting to puke – she thinks about the blade Lincoln gave her sinking between his ribs.

 

He should be happy she doesn’t do it. He should be kissing the ground she walks on for sparing him. Blood must have blood and she just took Pike’s even though it should be Bellamy’s blood on her blade.

 

Octavia sees him sleeping – and how can he fucking sleep when he’s done so many awful things? – curled up in a tiny ball on a couch. Her knife is suddenly in her hand, hovering right over his pulse point.

 

She has fantasized a thousand times with how she would get her revenge: she would pierce his lung for him to choke like she’s choking. She would tie him down and peel his skin off his body, slowly and methodically, giving him enough water for it to last. She would choke him.

 

A flash of Bellamy hanging limply in the dropship, of the sudden pang of fear, nausea and despair that hit her, that had her pause while Miller cut him down makes her stumble back.

 

Bellamy opens his eyes and looks at her. Takes her in and bares his throat for her. There’s a scar there where the rope made of belts cut the skin and he forgot to tend to it.

 

Octavia looks at that scar for a long moment.

 

She could do it. She’s not weak. She isn’t! And this man wronged her. Has wronged her so many times! He has broken his word, lied to her, kept her in a box and then put her into another, and another until the only thing that was left is a twisted and raw creature, desperate for some justice.

 

Still when he offers his neck to her, Octavia finds herself unable to move. Can’t take her revenge.

 

Bellamy has done this to her! Like a parasite he’s attached himself to her, leeching off her, poisoning her mind so that she cannot live without him. ‘I hate you’ she wants to say, but the words are stuck in her throat.

 

The gun feels foreign in her hand. The man kneeling before her has dark slanted eyes. He has wronged her, too – has saved her life and protected her, too. When he looks up at her she can nearly pretend it’s Bellamy.

 

“They put him on his knees, too.” Whispers Kane behind her and why won’t he shut up already? He keeps talking, forcing her to remember the moment Pike pulled the trigger and Lincoln fell. Forcing those images to play over and over in her mind. Pike putting a gun to Linclon’s head.

 

Where was Bellamy? Why didn’t he stop it?

 

‘He was tied up in the cave with Indra’ whispers a tiny voice that sounds oddly like Lincoln. He had tried to say something, but Octavia can’t remember what it was. Only that he had pleaded her to listen. Her and Indra.

 

Indra whom he had spared. The only survivor of Pike’s massacre.

 

The man – Ilian- kneeling in front of her has a black eye he can’t really open and looks ready to die. As ready as Bellamy did when he offered his neck to her. When he stayed put and let her beat him in the cave after _Pike_ killed Lincoln.

 

Oh, Gods!

 

If only she had listened to Bellamy. Lincoln would be alive.

 

Gods, no.

 

If she had listened to her brother.

 

Oh! Please, Gods.

 

Lincoln wouldn’t have had to die.

 

The foreign gun slips from her fingers. The pain crashes over her like the waves threatening to sink Ulysses ship. She cannot look at this boy whose pain seems to mirror her own. She cannot _stay_ here.

 

Not where Lincoln was killed. Where she did nothing to stop it.

 

Sheep a weird animals.

 

For one they look extremely similar to goats and she keeps mixing both to Ilian’s extreme delight. Also they seem docile, but they gang up on her when she tries to shear their matted fur.

 

Trishanakru is a very small community of about seven huts. Ilian’s is the only one housing only two people. They all have goats and small gardens and go pick fruits into the butterfly forest.

 

The first time Octavia sees the glowing butterflies she thinks of Atom. Of her first kiss and of the wonder she had felt during those first few days on earth. A growing voice inside her head asks her where that wonder has gone.

 

Octavia is not in love with Ilian, she knows that. She knows it as she climbs in bed with him after another hard day planting, herding sheep around and after looking for plants.

 

She knows it after trishanakru gets their night-blood-shot from a group of Azgeda warriors. She knows it as she prepares for nuclear winter and as she sits with the elder women in the tribe knitting and spinning wool.

 

She knows it as she speaks of the Ark and she knows it as she starts thinking of going back.

 

Sometimes Octavia wakes in the middle of the night, Ilian’s arm thrown over her waist, and she’s happy, content. Other times she wakes from a nightmare full of blood and death and Bellamy covered in terrible ulcers because he refused to take the night-blood shot.

 

She remembers him offering her his throat to cut and that she left without telling him where she was going.

 

When they prepare for the spring market in Polis, Octavia tags along. It’s been over two years and she knows the caravan will stop at Arkadia to trade a bit before continuing to Polis.

 

It’s been two years and she misses Bellamy. She wants to… Octavia isn’t sure what she wants. To see him? Tell him about trishanakru? Tell him she hasn’t killed anyone since she left Arkadia?

 

What she really wants – she muses as she leads Helios through a path she hasn’t walked in years – is to see if he’s managed to be happy. She wants to ask him to forgive her.

 

Octavia wants to tell him that she still thinks of Lincoln, but that the pain doesn’t choke her anymore. She knows she never told him she doesn’t blame him anymore.

 

Octavia hopes he knows.

 

Next to her Ilian pulls on her foot to get her attention.

 

“Everything ok?” he asks, his smile kind and relaxed.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Nervous?” the walls of Arkadia loom over them, the crackling of electrizity and the buzz of voice sort of familiar.

 

“No.”

 

He kisses her knee, rubbing his stubbled cheek against her leg.

 

The sun is shining and she feels warm and fuzzy.

 

Octavia doesn’t fall off her horse when she realizes she is in love again. It isn’t a shock, more like a welcomed surprise. There’s nothing complicated about her love for Ilian. No sense of urgency, not fear of discovery. It is simple and warm.

 

She slides of her horse, tying it to a post and sliding to his side. When his knuckles brush her hand she takes it, smiling up at him.

 

Ilian winks at her in that way he does: in which he just scrunches up his face, pulling up a side of her lip more than the other, because he has no clue how to actually wink.

 

Octavia kisses him anyway. They’ve kissed many times over the curse of their relationship. This one isn’t different: it’s just the same press of lips, slight brush of foreheads before they step away from each other to prepare their stand in the market.

 

 


	2. On Sacrifice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Murphy opens his mouth to say the three little words that might save Emori's life, but they get stuck in his throat and he can bring himself to choke them out.

The doors swoosh open and in comes the killing squad with fucking Wanheda at its head.

 

His mind is abuzz with half formed plans and unfinished sentences. There’s so much he still needs to tell Emori. So much stuff they haven’t done. She’s terrified even as she tries a half-assed attempt at pleading for her life, because she’s proud and will not beg.

 

Murphy looks at her: crouched on the floor, eyes shiny and wide, nearly round. He has never seen her so terrified. Hell, _he_ has never been so terrified in his life. Looking at her he understands what she was trying to tell him just minutes before when she begged him to play along, because he needs her safe. He needs _her_.

 

Murphy has lived a life where she wasn’t in it and it sucked.

 

The words ring clear and loud in his mind. He knows what he has to say. What he can say for Miller to put her down and the restraints to go off his wrists. And maybe she wouldn’t be _save_ exactly, but he’s a survivor, he has survived so much shit, what is an overdose on radiation, really?

 

Oddly enough is Bellamy’s voice whispering those words into his ear, those three little words that can safe her life. But when he opens his mouth to say them they get stuck in his throat and won’t come out.

 

They take her away and still the words are lodged in the back of his throat and he can’t choke them out and he hates himself for it.

 

Because Clarke doesn’t care. “Am I next?” he asks, and a part of him wishes he is, because he can’t comprehend a life without Emori in it. Not anymore. A part of him wishes it is, but for the most part he’s terrified that Clarke will say yes.

 

Murphy hates that part of himself with every fiber of his being. It’s the same that made him wake up every day for three months in that sealed bunker, the one that wouldn’t just refuse to eat and drink when the grounders tortured him. It’s the part that has brought him here and the part of him that keeps him from protecting Emori.

 

He’s so angry he can’t pull the emotional punches. He’s so desperate he doesn’t notice he went to far until Clarke takes a step back, tears shining in her eyes.

 

Shit.

 

Murphy can see the resolve shuttering every emotion in her, steeling her to do what – in her mind – has to be done. He’s woken Wanheda when he needed her to be Clarke and now he’s broken the thin thread to manipulate her, to guilt her into releasing Emori.

 

‘Just say the words’ whispers a voice that sounds oddly like Bellamy’s. And he wants to. He really wants to, because Emori is good and beautiful and the light of his life.

  
“I’m begging you! Please. I love her! Don’t do this!” his voice cracks.

 

And still he can’t bring himself to say the words.

 

Clarke is nearly in tears, but he has no sympathy for her. “If she dies.” Murphy says, and his voice doesn’t betray all the desperation he feels, it comes out as a promise “you die.”

 

And _that_ he can promise. Murphy is no stranger to getting revenge. Yes, the first time he killed those who had hung him it was sort of a “happy” coincidence, but this time he’s going to hunt her down.

 

Alone, tied to the ladder to the rocket his brain shutters to a halt, entering into an endless loop of all the things he’s done with Emori, all their wacky ploys and scams, all those nights by the fire.

 

He should have listened to her. They could have stocked up in the past few weeks. The bunker would have been big enough for both of them.

 

It would have been the smart move, but he wanted to stay and she didn’t take off, even though she wanted to. And now…

 

Murphy pushes his knees against his chest, the position awkward with his hands tied to the ladder.

 

It’s his fault, because he destroys everything he touches. If he hadn’t been so trusting. If he had listened to her…

 

The silence is worse than the screams would be.

 

Have they started? What are they doing?

The door swooshes open and in comes the king, who always calls Emori frikdreina and looks mildly disgusted by the both of them. He cuts the bindings. “You’re lucky” he grumbles and Murphy doesn’t know what that means, but he’s too busy flying past him and into the room.

 

Emori is lying on one of the metal beds. She appears to be sleeping: brow smooth and mouth relaxed. They’ve taken her headscarf and outer layers off, but they’ve left her glove on. At least they respected her that far.

 

He nearly crashes into the bed in his hurry to go to her. Is she even alive? There’s no blood on her, only the little bit from the scuffle before. He caresses her face and feels her pulse: strong against his fingers.

His knife jumps into his hand when someone moves closer to them.

 

Why have they let him loose? What is going on here?

 

Raven raises her hands. “It’s ok.” Raven’s voice is soft, her eyes fixed on him, not the knife. “You two are safe.” There’s a small pause. “Clarke put the bone-marrow into herself. We’re testing her.”

 

Raven lets the words sink in for a moment and, for once in his life, his brain is silent.

 

Wanheda has done what Murphy couldn’t bring himself to do. She has taken Emori’s place, even though she has no sympathy for her and he loves her with every fiber of his being.

 

He bows his head over Emori’s belly, hiding his shame in her body, clawing at her hand with his free one.

 

Raven comes closer and puts a tentative hand on his shoulder. It does nothing to reassure him, and yet, that part of him that wouldn’t let him speak, that wouldn’t let him starve or pull the trigger leans into her touch.

 

He hates it.

 

Raven pats his shoulder awkwardly, her voice soft. Kind like she hasn’t been since… Ever, really.

 

“Emori will be fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was unbetad.   
> Thank you so much for reading.

**Author's Note:**

> As always this was unbetaed. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading.


End file.
